following the "Great Accident", resulting in the moon moving out of Earth's orbit & drifting off, Moon-base Alpha was left to its own devices to survive. Over the next few years they had the usual malfunctions in their equipment & with very few spares at hand, made do with what they had. Eagle Transporter 3 suffered a major fire in the cockpit area rendering it unrepairable & so damaging it that the crew-pod was no longer able to hold an atmosphere. Unable to bring themselves to park Eagle-3 for parts just yet, the engineers decided to scavenge the crew-pod from the Falcon Lander that had failed to launch from the 1985 Moon-landing due to a fuel-pump failure. Even though it still contained the bodies of the two astronauts that were condemned to a slow death & was considered as sacred as a war grave, they appreciated that Alpha's situation justified such a move.The complete Falcon was retrieved and the astronauts buried in the landing crater - a simple monument was built over them. The lower Falcon stage was stripped of everything usable & the upper, crew section was fully refurbished with new & 2nd-hand parts. A jury-rig stystem of controls gave the pilots equally good control as a standard Eagle though her front-end didn't look anything like standard now .....

It may look a bit like a New York subway-car but as they say "form follows function".

I keep thinking of a center module, crewed or un-crewed, with multiple planar sensor arrays arranged around it (likely just clearing the ground on the bottom) for intensive sensor sweeps. A crewed one could do initial data processing and analysis there before sending it back to base via datalink; the other version would be directly datalinked to the base.